Cadence, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Ponte Solutions, Samsung, Sagantec, ST Microelectronics and Texas Instruments are the founding members of the the Design For Manufacturability Coalition (DFMC), as announced on Sept. 19 ,by Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2).
Si2 is an organization of semiconductor, systems, EDA and manufacturing companies focused on improving the way integrated circuits are designed and manufactured in order to speed time-to-market, reduce costs and meet the challenges of sub-micron design.
"Design for manufacturability by its very nature is a broad interdisciplinary science involving many aspects of chip design and manufacturing," says Lars Liebmann of IBM Semiconductor Research and Development Center. "Defining precise terminology and open interface standards is vital to exploiting the technical achievements made in DFM to date. IBM is looking to the DFMC to architect the infrastructure necessary to help us and our partners leverage DFM's full potential."
The DFMC was formed to address that issues that semiconductor manufacturers face due to the fact that semiconductor features are shrinking in size and pitch and it becomes a challenge to manufacturing them at acceptable yields increases dramatically." New materials, new processes, new equipment are being employed to challenge the laws of physics and are pushing the limits of known manufacturing science. More and more, manufacturing cycles and yield must be considered as an integral part of design of the library elements and the IC as a whole. IC production must become a collaborative effort across the disaggregated supply chain where business partners can share knowledge in a trusted environment - -an integrated enterp, " said Si2 in a statement.
"Today, DFM is where Signal Integrity was 5 years ago," says Jake Buurma, Si2's vice president. "Now SI is an integral part of the design flow and you can predict when you'll have crosstalk convergence. But you can't do that with DFM. If you have a DFM problem there is no easy way to converge so you miss the tapeout date and everyone loses. The biggest losers are the End User and the Silicon Foundry since the product will be late or be."
The DFM Dictionary is a recent work effort of the DFMC, and samples can be found at this link: http://www.si2.org/news_dir/2007/septnewsletter/sept07news.html
